“KSLA News 12 has discovered that the clergy would help the government with potentially their biggest problem: Us,” the report said.

The teams were used to help with the management of the masses following Katrina, according to Durell Tuberville.

He serves as chaplain of the Shreveport Fire Department and the Caddo sheriff’s office, and said the clergy team’s mission was to express the sentiment: “Let’s cooperate and get this thing over with and then we’ll settle the differences once the crisis is over.”

Sandy Davis, director of the Caddo-Bossier Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, said there are several advantages, but primarily, “these clergy would already be known in the neighborhoods in which they’re helping to diffuse that situation.”

So government orders to abandon homes, turn over guns, leave livestock behind, or whatever would come to the minds of various officials during an “emergency,” would be easier for people to accept, the report indicated.

The report said one of the biggest tools the clergy members would use would be the Bible itself, specifically Romans 13, where Tuberville said the Bible states “the government’s established by the Lord, you know. And, that’s what we believe in the Christian faith. That’s what’s stated in the Scripture.”

Civil rights advocates have raised questions about the idea of using clergy in such a fashion, noting the balance clergy would have to maintain when asked to do what the government wants under color of their status as a religious leader.

White House press secretary Tony Snow explained the order targets terrorist and insurgent groups not covered by existing authorities who come across the border from countries such as Iran and Syria.

But constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein charged the order violates the 5th Amendment’s requirement that no person shall be deprived of property without due process of law. Fein, associate deputy attorney general under Reagan, asserts it “empowers the president to destroy anyone he says plays a significant risk of undermining the rehabilitation or political reform in Iraq.”

“The order is a stunning assertion of executive power that creates a Sword of Damocles over anyone opposed to the war or who might otherwise come under the umbrage of the president,” Fein told WND.

That order follows a series of orders Bush has issued under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which so far have similarly cited “blocking the property” of people who threaten stability in Darfur, Zimbabwe , Ivory Coast , Syria , Belarus , Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Of these countries, the only one in which the U.S. is directly involved in a war is Iraq.